Met this lass out in the wildes near Todd Mountain.. our shoot was purposed to be visuals for a poster I had been working on for ages..

The plan for the session would be shooting some woolies for Splat and Co~ which has gone through a rebrand and is now The General Bean.. and we’ve slowed the river of hand knit products to less than a trickle, so.. the product(s) she is wearing are.. no longer available.. but she sure looked awesome in them. 

The poster idea I had sketched out has a crazed/ manic mountain biker speeding along with ‘bended’ bars, bended crank arms, most likely wearing Dr. Marten boots and a leather jacket.. and it kinda looks like he’s wearing a WWI leather pilots cap instead of a full face DH helmet.. and it was to be used for “Speed- 0- Thon.”

Speed- 0- Thon was an idea I’ve had since the early 90’s that would put a maximum number of gears on a bike.. to see how fast a cyclist could go if he (or she, for that matter) could continue to PUSH (power meter?!?!) on a normal descent.

Eric Barone hit massive speeds and his work with speed on bicycles is beyond compare but.. he was using gravity 100%.. so he was on super steep slopes like a volcano and later on.. a ski hill in France. Me? I wanted other people to try the challenge so I was going to set the decline at no greater than 10% .. 8% is easy to find.. 6% is more common.. Scott Hill is an 8% decline.. and for me, I “spin out” about 100m on the descent. So- ADD GEARS.

The bike she modelled with started off as a vintage steel Specialized Stumpjumper.. I added on an AMP F4 fork for cushion without stiction.. and then the fun began: Starting with a road crankset with *something like* a 52/40 chainring spread.. the rear wheel got built up by the cool folks over at Bow Cycle (Calgary).. a 650c rim laced to a 3SPD Sturmey- Archer hub that has a 9spd cassette on it…

Click to visit her gallery

 

So- [9spd x 3= 27] x 2 up front = a total of 54 gears! Sure, tons of overlap.. but it’s the top end I’m looking for. And this lass posed with an early itteration of The Bike.. the Suburbinator.. in the rain!